Fragged

by Zachariah Dracoulis

  Judging from the nods I was getting from around the room, I guessed that we’d reached the least objectionable option.

  “I still don’t like the idea of potentially getting eaten.” Miles mumbled.

  “Yeah, well, you can take it up with me after you die.” I said with a light-hearted smile, “Everyone ready?”

  “Ready as we’ll ever be.” the very naked Chad said, “Let’s run like Hell.”

  Chapter Eight

  Yeah… turns out we wouldn’t get to run like Hell. Don’t get me wrong, we burst out of that cabin like freakin’ action heroes, but pretty much the second we got outside we realised that ol’ rexy wasn’t taking any chances and had gotten us trapped in a corner that he’d made with the truck and the front of the cabin.

  Paul chuckled weakly for a second, then looked at me, “At least the Metois are gonna get a Hell of a surprise when they get here, eh?”

  I wanted to respond, but the t-rex had started pacing, watching us, waiting for the first of his prospective prey to make a run for it.

  “Fuck it,” I mumbled with a defeated sigh as I pulled out my lever action, “open fire!”

  With the exception of the gun-less Miles, everyone started laying down a blanket of fire and metal on the angry lizard tyrant, but we all knew that at worst, our bullets wouldn’t breach his thick hide, and at best they’d do so little damage that it probably wouldn’t even register in his tiny brain.

  Didn’t mean it wouldn’t aggravate him though.

  “He’s gettin’ ready to charge!” Paul roared over the gunfire.

  +1 Firearm Skill

  Firearm Skill: 9/100

  Level Progression: 120/150

  I didn’t bother responding to Paul, not because he wasn’t right, but because it seemed like a waste of time to try and squeeze in a few last words before we got mulched.

  My ammo wasn’t doing a damn thing, to the point that the shots that I was firing were netting me so little XP that the fact that I got a single point was a sheer miracle.

  That miracle was nothing compared to what came next though.

  “Is that...?”

  Chad didn’t get a chance to finish as, with the beauty and grace of a bulldozer, the Js came crashing out of the forest astride their noble dino mounts.

  Their guns were no match for t-rex’s skin, something I was sure that even their basic intelligence had knowledge of, but their steggie’s spiked tails sure as Hell were.

  Before the angered rex had a chance to react, the three steggies had charged it, slamming into where I’m sure the ute had crashed into last time, eliciting a yelp that sounded like it’d come from a large dog that’d been kicked.

  “Cease fire!” I shouted, taking my gun’s sights off the rex, “Conserve your ammo.”

  The team did as I said, with the exception of Miles who’d just kinda been standing there with his wood in his hands.

  Get it. Because he had a club? And wood also means erect pen- you know what? Forget it. Moment’s passed.

  I smiled as one of the steggies wedged its tail into the side of the rex, pulling it out again with a brilliant display of blood as the mighty carnivore struggled to pick a target.

  And then I realised what it was about to do, “Miles, get that tracker on the thing. Now.”

  “What?” Miles chuckled, “Beast’ll be out of the fight in a few seconds.”

  “No, it’s gonna run, and when it does I want it to be leading the Metois as far away from here as possible.”

  “Nah… I’m pretty sure it’s gonna-”

  “Just fucking do it!” I barked desperately as I noticed the rex looking around for a break in the steggies’ triangle of pain.

  Miles was stunned silent for a few seconds, but he managed to scramble toward the battle of giants and, after barely avoiding the massive reptiles’ feet and bodies, stick the tracker on the rex’s tail right as it barged through the Js protective line.

  “Well…” Miles trailed off from where he stood, looking out into the forest after his tagged dino, “that went better than expected.”

  Chapter Nine

  Slightly disappointed that the rex fight hadn’t amounted to much, I’d ordered the guys to start emptying out the toppled truck while I went to work checking in on our busy engineer.

  She wasn’t doing much, just writing her blueprints as she had been all day while her builder sat waiting, her talented hands resting uselessly in her lap.

  I didn’t quite know what to do from there. We’d survived the first attack, but that was against some dumb dino not a well-armed militia, and we’d survived it as we had most things; luck.

  Stupid, crazy amounts of luck that were neither predictable or useful in any way other than surviving to the next day.

  For some reason though, that made me feel better. Something about it having nothing to do with my ability to lead and it having everything to do with fate and circumstance took a lot of the weight off.

  Still though, things weren’t going fantastically by any stretch, and it wouldn’t have taken a genius to know that we really needed to figure out… everything.

  I’m not sure what made me crack open that chest of blueprints, probably the same boredom that made me open the fridge without actually needing or wanting anything, but words cannot accurately describe how happy I was that I did.

  I started reading through the list of dozens upon dozens of useless crap, ignoring the various items that I’d have been so excited to build when I first started playing but had since developed a cold disinterest in.

  “Small wooden corner, wooden sconce, wooden rail,” I muttered as my eyes lazily scanned, “wooden doorframe, wooden…”

  That’s when I saw it, just a few more items down the list.

  “Makeshift shield…”

  It was the kind of thing that I’d ignored a million times before, but for some reason it jumped out at me and gave me an idea.

  Learned Crafting Recipe: Makeshift Shield

  Description: Most people underestimate the power of a solid shield. They think ‘Eh, it’s better to have the biggest sword, or the loudest gun’, and that’s why most people die. This thing pales in comparison to what can be made with a forge, but it’ll keep bullets off of you long enough for you to charge them or, because let’s be realistic with you, to run away.

  I ran out of the nursery, the schematic still in my hand as I darted passed the guys working on emptying the truck and into the cabin.

  “What’re you doin’?” Chad asked as he came through the door behind me.

  “I have an idea.” I replied without really paying any attention to him as I looked between the various containers in the cabin, “Which of these has the scrap metal?”

  “The what?”

  “The scrap metal,” I said, paralysed with indecision, “from that first truck, and that leather you had one of the girls working on?”

  “Oh, the one by the bed.”

  I nodded and walked over to the chest of drawers and started rifling through it, “We keep talkin’ about how we’re gonna run away, yeah?”

  “Yeah… and?”

  “Well, I’m wonderin’ if we stop thinkin’ like scared little freshies and start thinkin’ like a proper clan.”

  +3 Scrap Metal:

  Damage: 2

  Description: A crafting material used in a whole mess of things, but be careful, stuff’s not exactly what I’d call clean. You’ve had your tetanus shots, yeah?

  +2 Leather Strips:

  Description: Kinky. Used for making a variety of handles and binding certain types of armour together.

  “What’re you talking about?” Chad asked as I started going to work on crafting my shield.

  “I’m talking about fighting back instead of preparing to go on the defensive.” I said as I basically magically sealed the various objects together, “If they get here we’re absolutely fucked, yeah? They’ll come at us from all sides, tear the cabin apart, kill the Js. It’ll be over in a matte
r of minutes.”

  “So, what? You reckon it’ll be better to go and meet them in forest and cut that time down for ‘em?”

  “No, I reckon we’ll fight them in the forest and win.”

  Removed: 3 Scrap Metal, 2 Leather Strips

  Crafted: Makeshift Shield:

  Durability: 130/130

  +1 Crafting Skill

  Crafting Skill: 4/100

  Level Progression: 130/150

  “With what? Your little tin shield? We’re going up against an armed militia, not Spartans.”

  “…Do you mean Greek or MJOL-”

  “Of course I mean Greek! Why would I be talking about super soldiers?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said with a big smile as I pushed my way past Chad and went outside, “you say weird stuff all the time, how am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

  “What you got there?” Pete asked, eyeing off my shield as he came out of the back of the overturned truck with the others.

  “Shield.” I proclaimed proudly as I slipped my forearm under the straps, “Paul, come shoot me.”

  Unsurprisingly, he was shocked by the request.

  “I um… You… What?”

  “Pull out that shotgun of yours and come take a shot at me,” I said as I crouched down in the patch of dirt that’d been shuffled around during the dino tussle, “I wanna see if this thing can take the hit.”

  I understood his reticence, the shield looked brittle as shit, but he wasn’t exactly one to stop following orders, or to turn away from an opportunity to shoot me with my consent.

  “Ready?” my shotgun-wielding friend asked from where he stood four feet from me.

  “Mmhm, fire away.”

  There were a few more seconds of delay as Paul contemplated whether or not he wanted to be responsible for my death if everything went tits up, but right as I started to catch his case of concern, he pulled the trigger hitting the shield with enough force to nearly knock me flat on my arse.

  Nearly.

  “Ho-o-oly shit!” I laughed, looking over my body for any trace that the shield had failed me.

  “You alright?” Paul asked nervously as I started checking the shield’s stats.

  Makeshift Shield:

  Durability: 105/130

  “Yeah,” I said with a smile, “yeah I’m good.”

  It wasn’t perfect, and I knew that once it got to below fifty percent the durability would drop like a recently fired and divorced business banker off a bridge, but it had certainly held its own.

  “I think this might work. Hey, Chad, mind-” I didn’t get the chance to ask him to test out his fancy gun on me before a burst of three bowel-emptying ‘tings’ bounced off my shield.

  “What the Hell!?”

  “What?” Chad asked innocently, “You were gonna ask me to shoot you, yeah?”

  “Yeah, but… I mean damn dude, could you at least have given me a little bit of warning? Or at least given me a chance to crouch?”

  “How was I supposed to know if you were crouching or not? I wasn’t even facing you.”

  “You wer-wait, really?”

  Chad nodded happily, “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Hell yeah that’s pretty cool.” I said before remembering that I was supposed to be upset that he fired blindly at me, “But try to be careful, yeah? They could’ve blown my head off.”

  “Yeah, like I wouldn’t know what that’s like…”

  I rolled my eyes at his faux bitchiness and looked back at the shield.

  Makeshift Shield:

  Durability: 52/130

  “Well damn…” I breathed, not even trying to hide how impressed I was, “I mean, we’re gonna have to be careful still, but I reckon this definitely has potential.”

  “Potential for what?” Miles asked.

  “Potential to get us all killed.” Chad said before I had a chance to explain, “Zo ‘ere wants to go out hunting for the Metois with shields so we can die nice and quick like. Make the job of finding and butchering us easy for ‘em.”

  “They won’t kill you,” Miles said matter-of-factly, “they’ll imprison you and wait until you quit the game.”

  “Yeah, don’t you rem-oh, yeah,” I said as I realised what Chad was busy doing while I was talking to our would-be kidnappers, “you were unconscious.”

  “Alright,” Chad mumbled confusedly, “be that as it may, I still don’t understand why you’d want to go rushing headlong into a situation like that. Hell, we don’t even know if these things’ll work against enemies. All we know for a fact is that we, your friends, couldn’t kill you. There’s no way we can test that they’d work.”

  “Actually,” Pete interjected, “there is a way we can test whether they’ll work. There’s a nest of Rabids not too far from here.”

  “How many?” Paul asked before I could.

  Pete shrugged, “Two, three dozen? And they’ve got weapons too. Spears and shit. Benefits of being in a bigger clan.”

  “And what if we run into the Metois?” Chad asked disapprovingly, leaning on Vera like a cane with one hand on his hip.

  “Not gonna happen, most people are smart enough to avoid Rabids.” Pete said before shooting me a smile, “Not us though. But it’s entirely up to you, wanna do a test run or just run out and hope for the best?”

  The decision was polarising to say the least, clearly Chad and Miles weren’t at all interested in tempting fate, but Paul seemed to be all for it, and I figured Pete wouldn’t have suggested it if he weren’t willing to do it.

  “Guess it’s Rabid season.”

  Chapter Ten

  After everyone had gone ahead and made their shields and I’d replaced mine, we’d gone on our little bushwalk, and I mean little.

  “How the Hell haven’t we run into these guys before?” I whispered as we inched toward the caveman-esque community and their cave in our tight tortoise formation.

  “Once they get to this level of society they won’t attack players until they grow large enough that a clan’s Home Base property line intersects with their own.” Pete explained.

  “I knew that,” I lied, blocking out the urge to ask him more about Rabids, “it’s just that I figured we’d have walked passed them at some point.”

  “Not that surprising really,” Paul said, “we don’t usually go this way.”

  “Everyone shut up!” Miles hissed, clutching his club like a toddler to a blankie.

  “Don’t get so catty,” Pete mocked, “you’re just upset because if we die it’s your fault.”

  “No, I’m upset because you won’t give me your pistol so that at least one of us can defend us.”

  “We’ve talked about this guys,” I whispered as we reached earshot of the Rabid clan, “we’re using the club so that we knock a few of ‘em out for the clan. When we finally do start building we’re gonna need some bots to help out around Home Base.”

  “Yeah, yeah…” Miles groaned, “I just don’t understand why I can’t at least be allowed to shoot ‘em in the legs.”

  I got what Miles was saying, and if I had a single-handed firearm that he could hold at the same time as the shield I’d hand it over, but the only one of us who did was Pete and they… well, in case you hadn’t noticed, they still weren’t getting along so well.

  “Ugh,” Chad complained as we shuffled another foot, “when are these guys gonna notice us?”

  “Stay patient dude,” Pete said, “think of all those boss fights where you’ve decided to break pattern and go for that extra hit and have gotten smooshed.”

  “I get that, but…” Chad trailed off as we all noticed the somewhat clothed Rabids starting to sniff the air.

  “This is it.” I muttered, getting ready to take the full brunt of the Rabid force, “You guys sure you’re ready?”

  “Well, not like we can run now anyway.” Paul half-joked.

  The Rabids spotted us and started grabbing up their spears cautiously, quietly talking amongst themselves in t
heir grunty semi-language.

  “Why aren’t they attacking us?” I asked nervously.

  Pete shrugged, “I think they’re deciding whether or not they should run.”

  “That’s it.” Miles huffed in frustration before breaking formation and stepping out of the protective shell of shields, “Come on you bastards! Let’s get this on!”

  “Ah,” Pete sighed with faux reminiscence, “I remember when he used to say that to me.”

  “Shut up.” I snapped, “Miles! Get back here!”

  “Why? Look at these guys, they’re terrified of us.”

  Terrified wasn’t the word I’d have used to describe the group of twenty or so Rabids clustered in front of the cave entrance, more like calculating.

  “Hey, Miles…” Pete said with genuine concern, “I… I think you should come back here. Something doesn’t feel right.”

  “Of course you’d say that, you just don’t want me to prove that I’m capable of handling myself.”

  And that’s when the Rabids parted and started chanting “Gren, Gren, Gren…” in time with them smashing their spears into the ground.

  That, my dear friend, is what we call an Alpha Rabid. It’s the leader of the tribe, and it’ll kick your lungs out through your back if you’re not careful. Might be useful to have in your Community if you can subdue him. Just saying…

  I seriously considered taking the game’s advice and trying to knock the Alpha out, but then the Jason Mamoa-but-bigger Gren came out of his cave and I immediately went into panic mode.

  “Open fire on the big one!”

  Chad shot me an annoyingly proud face, “But what about testing the shiel-”

  “Shut up and shoot!” I barked as I pulled out my DMR and aimed at the Alpha’s head.

  Miles was scrambling his way back toward us, the others had started shooting around him, and Gren was charging.

  My finger was hovering over the trigger, waiting as my target’s head moved from side-to-side as he bound toward me.

  Twenty feet from me.

  I held.

  Fifteen.

  Deep breath.

  Ten.